I am aggregating here some more or less interesting stuff of various IT related materials which I came across this month. Some of them are strictly related to the things I did or am currently doing.
01Some thoughts
Over the past month, I have been working on a highly scalable app on the Google Cloud Platform. I used Cloud Run and Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL) to provision the application code and database, respectively.
Cloud Run is a serverless compute platform that allows me to run my code without having to worry about managing servers. Cloud SQL is a managed database service that provides a reliable and scalable database for my app.
I also used PubSub messaging to decouple APIs that need to be very fast from more time-consuming processes. PubSub is a messaging service that allows me to send and receive messages between different parts of my app. This decoupling allows me to scale my app more easily, as I can add or remove background worker instances without affecting the performance of the APIs.
Finally, I used a load balancer to expose my app to consumers. A load balancer distributes traffic across multiple instances of my app, which helps to improve performance and reliability. The load balancer also allows me to redirect country-specific load to the instances closest to the users, which improves the user experience.
It is very rewarding when you see that an app scales well and handles traffic peaks without impacting latency.
02Articles
5 linksA few words on communication
It’s clear that even if we don’t want to talk to humans, we need to do it, which won’t change whether we like that.
Slack System Design
The key takeaway from building Slack is that optimality is contingent and should be adapted with growth. It is crucial to identify the end-to-end part of the problem to build a distributed system.
Unleashing Engineering Excellence: Proven Methods to Tackle Tech Debt and Supercharge Your Engineering Team
A head of engineering’s guide to conquering tech debt and empowering engineering excellence.
Google Cloud blog: The Modernization Imperative: Shifting left is for suckers. Shift down instead
As an industry, we need to help out. First, instead of telling devs (and their managers!) to shift everything left, we need to encourage them to “shift down” by taking full advantage of the technology available to them, and push more workloads down onto the platforms they’re already using.
03Productivity
2 linksHarvard Business Review: Remote Work Should Be (Mostly) Asynchronous
A move to a better way of working remotely is desperately needed. If your digital transformation is going to be successful, you need to give your employees the right tools and systems to work in a digital, distributed, virtual environment.
Awesome Quantified Self
The Quantified Self is a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical).
04AI
2 linksShort Course ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers
This short course taught by Isa Fulford (OpenAI) and Andrew Ng (DeepLearning.AI) will describe how LLMs work, provide best practices for prompt engineering, and show how LLM APIs can be used in applications for a variety of tasks.
GPT Engineer
Specify what you want it to build, the AI asks for clarification, and then builds it.
05Python
6 linksThe Many Problems with Celery
Celery is the de facto solution for background workers and cron jobs in the Python ecosystem, but it’s full of footguns.
Makefile tricks for Python projects
I like using Makefiles. They work great both as simple task runners as well as build systems for medium-size projects. This is my starter template for Python projects.
The Right Way to Run Shell Commands From Python
In this article we will look at all the options you have in Python for running other processes - the bad; the good; and most importantly, the right way to do it.
Interacting with Kubernetes Deployments and Services using Python SDK
This article will demonstrate how to interact with Kubernetes Deployments and Services using Python and the official Kubernetes Python client.
AsyncIO: Why I Hate It
I hope it will encourage some readers (especially in the web development crowd) to question whether asyncio is appropriate for their project, and if so, look into alternatives like gevent.
Pro-Tip – pytest fixtures are magic!
The more of our codebase that is covered by meaningful tests the faster we can develop new features and refactor cruft. It is not just about bug-free code. It’s about the speed at which you can develop good code.
06Python libraries
2 linksFastAPI Best Practices
Opinionated list of best practices and conventions we used at our startup.
JSON to Pydantic Converter
To generate a Pydantic model from a JSON object, enter it into the JSON editor and watch a Pydantic model automagically appear in the Pydantic editor.
07Go
1 linkGoogle Cloud Platform Go Samples
This repository holds sample code written in Go that demonstrates the Google Cloud Platform.
08Tools
3 linksHariSekhon/SQL-scripts
100+ SQL Scripts - PostgreSQL, MySQL, Google BigQuery, MariaDB, AWS Athena. DevOps / DBA / Analytics / performance engineering. Google BigQuery ML machine learning classification.
HariSekhon/DevOps-Bash-tools
1000+ DevOps Bash Scripts - AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, APIs, SQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Hive, Impala, Kafka, Hadoop, Jenkins, GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, Azure DevOps, TeamCity, Spotify, MP3, LDAP, Code/Build Linting, pkg mgmt for Linux, Mac, Python, Perl, Ruby, NodeJS, Golang, Advanced dotfiles: .bashrc, .vimrc, .gitconfig, .screenrc, tmux..
The C4 model for visualising software architecture
Context, Containers, Components, and Code
09Cloud
5 linksGitOps
This site aggregates the essence of GitOps to help clear up the confusion about the topic.
Argo CD - Declarative Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes
Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes.
“Sealed Secrets” for Kubernetes
Problem: “I can manage all my K8s config in git, except Secrets.”
Solution: Encrypt your Secret into a SealedSecret, which is safe to store - even inside a public repository. The SealedSecret can be decrypted only by the controller running in the target cluster and nobody else (not even the original author) is able to obtain the original Secret from the SealedSecret.
k3s
Lightweight Kubernetes. Production ready, easy to install, half the memory, all in a binary less than 100 MB.
10Other stuff
1 link11Podcasts
2 linksThe Privacy, Security, & OSINT Show – Episode 299 - Self-Hosted Part I
This week I begin the conversation about self-hosting everything, plus offer the latest privacy news.
The Privacy, Security, & OSINT Show – Episode 300 - Self-Hosted 2: Offline Knowledge
This week I continue the self-hosted series with several easy options from which anyone can benefit. Let’s archive some powerful data for offline use.
12Videos
6 links
Single-node Kubernetes Clusters Using K3s with Benefits of GitOps • Lasse Højgaard • GOTO 2021
Top 5 techniques for building the worst microservice system ever - William Brander - NDC London 2023
